Zoox robotaxi launches in Las Vegas
zoox.com
zoox.com
Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.
One downside to Uber in Vegas is that airport pickups happen in some hot parking garage far from the terminals.
"Oh, sorry, I don't carry cash. Better luck next time man!"
"Oh it just started working."
The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
We don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.
Have you been to San Francisco or LA?
It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?
It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.
The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.
My sister and I would pass the time folding up a piece of paper and each of us got to draw part of a person without seeing what the other had drawn. Sort of like visual madlibs.
I am curious: Unsafe because a " 1970 Plymouth Satellite" or because "rear-facing seat"?
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/img/pictonorzw/plymouth/1...
Looking at that picture, I see belts, but I do not recall those belts and suspect they were deeply wedged into the seat and forgotten about.
For those people, rear-facing seats can exacerbate motion sickness. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
3. Yay again!
As a waymo user, I'm looking forward to a little more competition in the market. I quite like waymo, but driving price down woudl be great.
> Simply open the Zoox app to take a ride from several destinations on and around the Strip.
This puts it dramatically behind Waymo where I can walk out on any block in the coverage area and tell it to take me to any other block in the coverage area, not to mention Uber and Lyft.
I'm sure Zoox can improve this, but right now it resembles a self-driving shuttle more than a taxi service.
What's considered normal for humans, driving higher than the speed limits, will not for automatic cars.
So yeah, they'll do the same thing as humans eventually.
Speeding can usually be brushed off as carelessness. Where it can’t, we charge it more harshly.
A robot programmed to speed serves a jury mens rea on a plate.
So we're describing a hypothetical problem a decade or more out in respect of a technology evolving so quickly a significant fraction of people still don't even believe it's real.
I've seen plenty of robotaxi huckers advocate for speed limits 'appropriate for robot response times'
Where?
It's part of discussions around hypothetical futures where everything is self-driving and the vehicles communicate with each other to form dense convoys on places like freeways where there aren't pedestrians.
I certainly haven't heard any mainstream suggestions that self-driving taxis ought to drive faster than humans in spaces they share with human drivers and human pedestrians.
Think about SF, its size is (famously) around 7 by 7 miles. So it'd take 12 minutes to cross (as the bird flies) from one side to another at 35 mph and 17 minutes at 25mph. Which is completely unrealistic, because real travel times are dominated by traffic lights and congestion.
This calculation changes only when we're talking about long-distance travel on freeways. But honestly, I expect that fast long-distance trains with seamless transfer to self-driving taxis would be a better idea.
...dramatically reduces likelihood and consequences of a crash
(Musk 6 years ago saying it's happening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8X8NdcV7Wc It hasn't yet of course)
A robotaxi doesn’t care where it can or can’t drive. It just follows graph search and speed limits.
That means we can design cities around how we want them to look, instead of bending everything around today’s messy car infrastructure.
Announcement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation/zoox-headquarter...
Amazon owns it, not just funded them.
> There is no steering wheel afaik
Maybe the control is in a remote centre then
Yeah that's fair, when I interviewed with them I remember asking that specifically and they were just a lead investor. Crazy how much a year changes things like that.
Now to start a tangent, what's the easier problem to solve: FSD, or a robust public transport system? Moving rooms have always been around in the form of trains, busses, streetcars etc...
To people outside the Bay, self driving might still seem like some far-off future tech. I can tell you that the future is already here. I haven't used an Uber in the last 3 years because I will always pick Waymo instead.
I'm being slightly fanatical, but if our priorities were not car-centric in the 50's, do you think we would have spent more, or less money over the last 70 years on the transportation economy?
The global AV industry has taken roughly as much funding as California HSR has on its own, and less than what HSR will need to finish.
I've been doing public transit advocacy for my entire adult life. I've worked in the AV industry somewhat less than that. My advocacy has produced a couple of bike lanes and bus stops, contrasted against 3 AV launches.
I'd love to build more public transit, but experience tells me that the most effective thing I can do to support my community is AVs.
Said like someone who doesn't have elderly parents, and doesn't plan to age…
By far the worst part about said Ubers and Taxis is the driver. They're an unpredictable element in a situation where I greatly appreciate predictability. Unlike my parents, I didn't grow up with staff, so I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
This says nothing about self driving cars
> So I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
I don't mean to be harsh, but, get over it? We live in a service economy. Do you feel the same way about the barista taking your coffee order?
> Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
I don't like the assumption you're making that Waymos are the only solution to ubers, taxis or driving yourself. Well designed and well working public transportation (Which is doable and exists in the world) is far cheaper and far more predictable than any form of car-based transportation.
Not only that, but you're not responding to my actual argument. The annoying part of driving is not the act of driving, it's the time spent in your commute.
I very literally did not make that assumption. I pointed out, in a sentence you quoted yourself, that public transit can drastically reduce the amount of point-to-point personal transportation an individual wants or needs. However, sometimes, you really can't beat the convenience of "I am at point A, I want to be at point B, and I don't want to deal with a series of stops and transfers to get there". Maybe your starting or ending point is an unusual location. Maybe it's an unusual time of day. Maybe you're wearing a tuxedo or a cast and don't want to do the amount of walking public transit normally requires.
In any case, point-to-point transit is sometimes worth the expense. And when it is, self-driving taxis are fantastic. Compared to driving myself, I don't have to commit at least 75% of my attention to not killing myself or others. I can just read a book, or watch a movie, or do the morning crossword. Compared to taxis or Uber, I don't need to deal with a driver.
Here's a speculative but plausible take: Zoox and Waymo are both products of cloud computing and data gathering giants. Maybe that's the important factor.
Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Pony.ai, Baidu's Apollo, Argo.ai and Aurora all have/had very similar approaches to the technology. Tesla is the major outlier and they haven't accomplished much in spite of the hype.
It's a product area that is very far from being able to horizontalize. Waymo Driver is going to run on Waymo hardware for a long time to come. Toyota is supposedly trying to use Waymo technology for personal vehicles. I expect adapting it will take years. The software is nothing like an app running on an operating system. All of these systems probably require years of effort to move them to a different hardware platform.
I'm curious to know where you get information on stuff like this. The Google self-driving car project was fairly transparent in the early days but since things have gotten competitive everybody is pretty tight-lipped about the particulars of what they're doing.
Unfortunately, information ages quickly. Stuff that Waymo published about their architecture only a few years ago is now wildly out of date.
That said, diversity is decreasing. Most players are standardizing on relatively similar hardware platforms using nvidia compute, with connectivity heavily focused around ethernet as opposed to older buses.
I make TikTok's about technology and project management. Elon's management style has been, some might say, a running gag in my videos, so I am more tuned into these topics than your average bear.
- get lost
- be late
- collide with a moving car
- collide with stationary object
- run over a pedestrian (bonus for multiple!)
Although from the article, it sounds like this might not be servicing a wide enough area to win the bet even if the time was extended a couple years.
1 it's not fully autonomous, there's a remote operator
2 not a wide enough service area as defined in the bet
3 it's a pilot program, also excluded in the bet
4 it's also a year late and the bet is very much still lost
lol but we're going to have self driving cars by 2015 guys!
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo...
An 8-10 year delay from expectations is not too bad all things considered.
Seems like robotaxis are getting ready for a big expansion, I see Waymos all over Orlando even though they don't offer service here.
…what does this mean? Are vibes another way of saying you feel like it without evidence?
Ubiquitous, and life changing for the millions of people who use them daily?
Apollo One has already launched service in the UAE and is expected to launch in Singapore and Malaysia by the end of the year. They're also expected to start testing in several European countries by the end of the year. The question I have at this point is, will only China benefit from launching this new global industry, or will the US manage to also be competitive on a global scale?
This valley has congestion issues pretty much all day everywhere, plus a traffic light management protocol that results in very long light cycles.
Many of us when coming to a red light where there are multiple lanes and traffic is light, will make a point to not stop in the right lane when there is no right turn only lane. This is so people who are making a right turn can make a right on red instead of waiting for a green.
Zoox does not do this.
Sometimes there is not quite enough space between vehicles to get into a lane while cars are stopped at a light, such as getting into a left turn lane. Often, some light taps on the horn (or even just sitting with the turn signal) will result in drivers pushing up tight to let you into the left turn lane.
Zoox does not do this.
Zoox will change lanes many times for no apparent reason, making drivers think it is turning right or left at the next intersection, but it does not turn.
As best I can tell, Zoox has issues with pedestrians. I think that the operator (in the test vehicle) takes over when pedestrians are present, because so far I always see them operating the steering wheel when there are pedestrians.
As a driver, I don't like any of the automated drivers because I feel there is a thing that can do serious damage and nobody is accountable. These are all owned by corporations whose sole accountability will be financial, nothing more, while drivers are held to both financial a punitive accountability.
Further, these are all mega-conglomerates for whom there is no real regard for the destruction their property causes. They are politically connected, so will never lose their operating license. The are funded by the largest investors mankind has ever known. Nobody in these organizations has any respect for morals or ethics, instead fostering a system that promotes psychopaths.
I don't want them here. I haven't spoken to anyone who lives here that wants them here.
Why change the topic to safety?
Insurance IIRC is 3 highest in the nation. I'm paying $3000 per year with max limits full coverage and this is lower than most people I talk to.
1. operator or computer vision detects dirt in salon
2. route the autonomous vehicle to contracted carwash
3. return car back to service
4. charge customer for the cleanupDoesn't change the service outage piece, but it will get better.
That being said, your key point - people can do what they want in this thing and no one can really stop them, does stand.
Utterly disturbing announcements and rollouts like this aren't prominently linked with comprehensive testing videos.
"We're a tech company, just trust us"
The only thing I like about this is the potential to make Tesla look bad.
Do you think I care about the people IN the car?
Self-driving is about the safety of the people OUTSIDE of the car.
Because the humans in New York, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco frequently cancel rides, get lost, drive unsafely, pitch me on their religion and smell. (They also must be tipped, at which point the Waymo is the same price or cheaper than the human-driven ride.)
When I have the option of a robotaxi, I pay a premium for it. It’s novel. It’s fun. But most importantly, it’s safe, punctual and comfortable. Otherwise, I'm fine taking a human-driven car. Having more options makes those cities a better experience.
How I wish I was in a Waymo right now! I've never had remotely such a poor experience in a SF robotaxi.
This caused them to increase the driver pool beyond the point of competence. That, in turn, required degrading customer service to the point that if I actually need help I have to use the flow that says I was in an accident or raped.
Waymo is neat as a robotaxi. But the reason it wins is they seized the nationwide premium market, a beachhead Uber (and paradoxically also Lyft) left undefended.
expensive, sometimes they sexually harass/assault the passengers, sometimes the drivers are also dangerously tired
> Or a bus (also driven by a human)?
slow (especially because USians oppose optimal stop spacing) and dirty, no door-to-door air conditioning, not separated from poor people
It’s slow because it must solve for many possible routes. Cabs are point to point. A rideshared cab, moreover, knows ex ante where its customer is going and, in a city, where its next customer is.
> But it misses the social context
Funny how their entire social context is "never encounter another human as you go from A to B"
It's funny. It's also dumb. An observation can be both at the same time--it's a cornerstone of humor. What it isn't is fundamentally true or revealing.
> their entire social context is "never encounter another human as you go from A to B"
Nope. It's recognising that humans have diverse and varying needs for interaction and privacy.
I like to dine out, even alone. That doesn't make everyone who eats at home alone an idiot. (That doesn't mean I can't make jokes about it. But they shouldn't be mistaken for truth.)
Well, they are not a solution to transport problems, or to traffic jams.
Yes, they can be complementary to other types of transportation. Yes, companies will enshittify them beyond measure if/when they reach a certain proportion of cars.
> It's recognising that humans have diverse and varying needs for interaction and privacy.
No. I don't think this was even uttered by any of these companies.
Waymo claims to be committed to safety: https://waymo.com/about/
Tesla: stress and safety https://www.tesla.com/fsd
Zoox: purpose-built taxi shaping the future of transportation https://zoox.com/about
Nor to world hunger.
> companies will enshittify them beyond measure
A hypothetical applicable to every mode of transit, private and public.
> don't think this was even uttered by any of these companies
Things can be true without being in a corporate press release. (Also, you're the one who originally argued these services' "entire social context is 'never encounter another human as you go from A to B'." If not being in a press release is an argument against one, it 's an argument against the other.)
Though, in this case, it has been said: "Waymo gives you your own personal space to focus on more meaningful things" [1].
Ah, the good old ad absurdum.
These companies literally hail themselves as "future of transportation".
> A hypothetical applicable to every mode of transit, private and public.
These are private companies looking for profit. These are not hypotheticals given what is happening to other cars and car manufacturers.
> Also, you're the one who originally argued these services' "entire social context is 'never encounter another human as you go from A to B'."
These are literally robo taxis. A taxi is literally a car that is taking you from A to B. And they are also removing the driver from them. Oh, and don't forget the existing of things like Boring Co. which exists almost solely to undermine public transport.
Their intended future is nothing but endless roads with isolated vehicles going from A to B. There's no other "social context".
There are so very many opportunities for a better surface transport system than buses. Dynamic routing and scheduling, capacity somewhere between a city bus and a taxi, and potentially better economies of scale all make this far more appealing than what exists today.
Also – and I know acknowledging this will not go over well in some circles – requiring an app and a credit card will go a long way toward keeping riders of a certain disposition off the vehicles. No, it's not a perfect proxy for who will and won't make riding unpleasant or unsafe, but riders will intuitively understand it even if they don't want to think about it, and it will make a difference.
Anyone who knows something about transit already knows this is false. the idea has been tried and failed for hundreds of years. What people want is predictable transit that is there when they want to go and gets people places in a reasonable amount of time. Nobody cares about other stops.
People hate dynamic routing because it means they never arrive at the same time and in turn they can't use transit at all unless they plan to arrive way too early. Most trips are time sensitive, that isn't just the trip time, but also they have to be someplace at a specific time.
People hate dynamic scheduling because it means they can't take spontaneous trips. They can't be late for their planned trip. They will miss the bus once in a while because something didn't go to plan.
What people want is predictable routes that run so often they don't need to look at a schedule. They can figure out how to navigate it. Places people want to be will figure out those routes and location where it is easy to get to.
Okay, what people really want is Star Trek style teleportation. The point is to be someplace fast, not the journey. This is impossible though, so we compromise. the best compromise for transit is frequent systems that run predictable routes.
https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/uberx-share/
Convergent Evolution happening in realtime- it's almost as if community pooled forms of transportation are the most efficient...
I've tried the current basic share option and it's not great, and I say that as someone who used pre-pandemic UberPool. You typically don't save much off a standard UberX ride, it's only available for exactly one person, the arrival estimates are wildly optimistic, and if the other rider isn't in the car they seem to never be ready when you get to their pickup location.
It's unfortunately, but the current pricing model seems to attract passengers who really don't want to be paying for an Uber but at least this way they can save a couple of bucks, which means they're typically in a stressful situation. Very different vibe from the old, social and wildly cheap UberPool, but that probably was never sustainable.
We all know trains would be nice. Unless you have some plan to rework our government into something that will allow for innovation here, then I prefer to see progress, even if it's not ideal.
It's a dumb comment. But I find it interesting in how it reveals opportunities to leverage bridging expertise.
The infamous Dropbox comment [1] illustrated the complete lack of domain knowledge in marketing, sales and generally how non-tech people work that was commonplace among coders. A lot of people made a lot of money, and made a lot of other peoples' lives better, but bridging that gap.
This bus meme, on the other hand, illustrates a complete lack of domain knowledge around marketing and, in all likelihood, how governments and public transit work in the real world.
However, before that problem is solved, maybe solve mass-transit from the airport to the strip first?
And that could work, if the car in front can communicate power/brake/turn commands to the cars in the chain. And if you could dynamically drop cars out of the middle when needed. And if you could dynamically add cars when they're neighboring and going the same way. All those could be tricky, but they seem quite solvable.
I already commute by train. I’d like to have something more flexible.
Of all the places to try a gimmick, Vegas is the right place.
No it wouldn't. Those hotel shuttles and taxies are ideal for anyone with luggage as you don't have to carry your own heavy bags with you. The train doesn't want those people slowing things down for everyone as they get all their bags on/off the train.
Airport lines are a good idea because many thousands of people work at airports and thus don't have luggage. They are also useful for travelers taking a short trip and thus don't have much packaged. However Vegas as a vacation destination is expected to have a lot of people with luggage and less people who are light travelers.
Once tourists drop their bags in their room they should be using transit for every trip until it is finally time to return to the airport.
Yes, that's why they call it the Las Vegas strip. It is an entire city literally designed for tourists.